Piano, bass, drums and five pairs of feet: These were the instruments employed for Shelley Oliver Tap Dancers' Saturday performance at Dance Place. Appearing with the David Leonhardt Jazz Group, the Pennsylvania-based dancers married tap and jazz in a show that was as much music concert as dance performance.

The Quirky Love Song of Andrew J. Nemr Has RhythmAll for Loveby EVA YAA ASANTEWAA for the Village Voice

Too often aggressive, highly mic'd footfalls fought canned music, canceling each other out. Tap works best when music can breathe and coax fresh, interactive responses, not lockstep action, from dancers.

Rhythm in their solesFestival underscores surprisingly rich legacy of female tap dancersby LUCIA MAURO, special to the Chicago Tribune

This week's Chicago Human Rhythm Project - one of the country's largest tap and rhythmic dance festivals - will put plenty of female tap artists in the spotlight. During the festival's seven-day run at Northwestern University, women will teach master classes and headline several concerts.

From twentysomethings to octogenarians, these female artists represent a timeline of women in tap.

Bring in Da Tap, and Make It Lastby CLAUDIA LA ROCCO for the New York Times

His faith is a necessary armor. Even as tap's superstar, Savion Glover, opens what will no doubt be another dazzling, sold-out run on Tuesday at the Joyce Theater, scores of talented tap dancers hustle for gigs, and respect. Nine years after Mr. Glover's show "Bring In da Noise, Bring In da Funk" fundamentally altered the tap landscape when it hit Broadway, in 1996, there is still no consistent performance schedule beyond the growing but still small tap festival circuit pioneered by dancers themselves, ...

Win or Lou Lou's, it's putting on the writsby LUKE BENEDICTUS for the Age

It has all the ingredients of a Strictly Ballroom-style musical: the tale of the tap-dancing apprentice who broke away from her glamorous mentor and went on to usurp her crown as the queen of the local tap scene.

...

The spat has broken out between Lou Lou Kearney (better known in the dance community as "Miss Lou Lou") and the woman she describes as her arch rival: Jane Guy (aka "Miss Jane"). At stake is the right to use the Miss Lou Lou trademark.

'Imagine' conjures delights of tap theater in short stories by HEDY WEISS for the Chicago Sun-Times

And that is where the creators of "Imagine Tap!" - dancer-choreographers Derick K. Grant and Aaron Tolson - have stepped in, devising a program of short stories in tap.

Their idea is simply to put percussion in the service of character and plot, enhancing a dozen or so deftly sketched scenarios with some scenery, projections and just the right music (from standards to special material by Zane Mark and Crystal Joy), and to conjure the delights of tap theater as it existed in old movie musicals.

Following her review of Twyla Tharp's latest, Marcia Siegel reviews a recent local tap dance production. From the Boston Phoenix:

Quote:

Twyla’s Dylan in New York; Rhythm at the Regent....A circus of another kind, more modest and more entertaining, was on view last weekend at the Regent Theatre in Arlington. Rhythm at the Regent, produced by Josh Hilberman and Thelma Goldberg’s Dance Inn, was an old-fashioned variety show featuring tap dancing and tap-inflected variety acts...... I cherish the memory of Josh Hilberman simultaneously dancing and playing “Sweet Georgia Brown” on the ukulele while commenting on his own performance. And then, for an encore, dancing and playing “When the Saints Go Marching In,” accompanying himself on the kazoo.

Pushing Tap’s Limits, With (or Without) Heelsby CLAUDIA LA ROCCO for the New York Timespublished: December 14, 2006

Working with her fellow tap-dancer Ayodele Casel, 31, Ms. Savelli has done just that. Tired of complaining about the dearth of performance opportunities, they created Tandem Act Productions, which makes its New York debut this weekend with master classes at Chelsea Studios and performances at Symphony Space: the one-woman show “Who Is Sarah Savelli?” and a family event, “Tappy Holidays,” featuring youth ensembles and standout professionals like Michelle Dorrance, Jason Samuels Smith and Carson Murphy, re-imagining Christmas standards and sharing their own holiday experiences.

Show filled with wondrous featsThis weekend’s Beantown Tapfest made it resoundingly clear -- tap dance is alive and kicking in Boston. Enthusiastic fans flocked to workshops and packed the house for Friday night’s “On Tap!” showcase highlighted by the reunion of hometown boy Derick Grant, Michelle Dorrance, and Aaron Tolson in their first appearance together since “Imagine Tap!”

The lively, well-paced show ... also included two new companies: the Japanese troupe Zen and Tolson’s New England Tap Ensemble ....

Tellers and a show - Josh Hilberman, Jody Weber, and Beth Soll.... Josh Hilberman MC’d his own one-man tap show, Heeling Powers: Rhythms of the Left Brain.... He could have been a businessman or a butcher. But after modest opening remarks, he became the zany tap wizard he really is, dancing in half a dozen styles with costumes of ever-escalating weirdness, mostly in dialogue with the redoubtable Paul Arslanian’s jazz piano.

What’s left behind - Tap Olé at the Regent, Rachid Ouramdane at the ICA, Prometheus at Boston Conservatory

....Tap Olé is less a new-fangled bicultural fusion than a return to tap dancing’s foundational swingtime. Alejandro Pérez Gracia bent his contemporary flamenco guitar riffs bluesward like a Clapton wanna-be, eliciting a raised eyebrow from straight man Roger Raventós: the two were not beyond lacing their rumba with corny television themes and Beatles hits.

Norman Wallace; tap dancer who started in vaudevilleTap dancer Norman Wallace, whose acrobatic dance moves took him from vaudeville to "The Ed Sullivan Show," died in his sleep Sept 10 at a Jamaica Plain nursing home. He was 89.

Mr. Wallace, who performed at the Cotton Club in Harlem and around the world with his brother Scott, had lived in Boston since the late 1960s and worked for more than a decade as the bell captain at the Copley Plaza Hotel.

'Celtic' taps into worlds of rhythm"Celtic Tap: An Evening With James Devine" is a rhythm lover's dream. The Irish dancer's most flamboyant claim to fame is the ability to tap his feet a mind-blowing 38 beats per second. He's documented by Guinness World Records as the "Fastest Dancer in the World." However, Devine's extraordinary speed would only be shallow virtuosity if he didn't put it to the service of artistic imagination and vision, and that he does, big time

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